Eurogamer Expo 2009!

The Eurogamer Expo is coming back! Following last year's great success in London, we're expanding the show to cover the north and south of England for Eurogamer Expo 2009 - partnered with hmv.

Those of you "above the fold", so to speak, will now be able to check out the Eurogamer Expo at The Royal Armouries in Leeds on 27th and 28th October - in association with Game Republic and Screen Yorkshire.

The show will then head south and take up residence at Old Billingsgate - more than 80,000 square feet of space - on 30th and 31st October.

The decision to bring the show to two cities was taken mostly in response to your feedback last year. London's a long way to go for a lot of people, and we'd rather the show was convenient for more of you.

Another change is hmv's sponsorship, which means that there will be a retail presence at both rounds of the Expo. If you see a game you like and it's out, you should be able to buy it and, if not, pre-order it.

With two legs and bigger venues, we can also host more gamers - with up to 14,000 tickets available from the Eurogamer Expo website, priced at GBP 6 per day.

Naturally we will have all the big games in both cities, and we will be making more announcements in the coming weeks and months about what will be there. But based on last year's line-up you can expect to play pretty much anything you're eyeing up for Christmas.

If you missed the Expo last year, check out the EGTV Show for the highlights. And me.

Any questions? If you do, then read on to hear what Eurogamer managing director Rupert Loman had to say when I went into his office and started interrogating him. Full disclosure: Eurogamer.net and Eurogamer Expo are obviously run by the same company. To offset this, I decided to play hardball up front.

Eurogamer:
If you like videogame expos so much, why don't you go live there?

Rupert Loman:
Errr...

Eurogamer:
Nice press release, but which games are we going to see at the Expo? TELL US YOU BASTARD.

Rupert Loman:
We're not saying yet! We're going to start announcing the playable games after E3. We don't think people will be disappointed though - we're doing our best to get every big game coming out this Christmas and some from next year too.

We've been working on the show since January and we've got quite a few excellent titles confirmed already, and many more are in discussion, some of which haven't even been publicly announced by their publishers yet!

Eurogamer:
What's the difference between the Leeds and London versions of the Expo?

Rupert Loman:
They are going to be very similar - the same games will be playable at both venues. But the London event is bigger so there'll be more consoles for each game there. There'll be a few extra attractions exclusive to each event, but the games will be the same.